About American Assassin
Directed by Michael Cuesta, American Assassin stars Dylan O’Brien, Michael Keaton, Sanaa Lathan, Shiva Negar, David Suchet, Navid Negahban, Scott Adkins, and Taylor Kitsch.
Here’s the premise and honestly it’s a doozy: guy named Mitch watches his girlfriend get murdered in a terrorist attack on a beach. Does he go to therapy? Of course not. He trains obsessively in combat and marksmanship for eighteen months and then tries to infiltrate a jihadist cell solo. The CIA spots him doing this, goes “huh, this psychologically damaged young man seems useful,” and recruits him into a black ops unit run by a grizzled Michael Keaton. Things escalate from there in the way that things in these movies always escalate, involving nuclear weapons, rogue operatives, and a villain who might just be the worst possible outcome of the same training program Mitch is going through.
It’s a slick, propulsive film. Not a classic, but an extremely good time if you’re in the market for lean, mean spy-action. And after you finish it, you’re going to want more exactly like it. So here, have twenty-eight more exactly like it.
1. Blade (1998)
Director: Stephen Norrington | Cast: Wesley Snipes, Stephen Dorff, Kris Kristofferson, N’Bushe Wright, Donal Logue
A Half-Vampire Walks Into a Nightclub…
Look, before we get into Blade, can we just appreciate that in 1998 a studio looked at a Marvel Comics character who was half-human, half-vampire, wore all black, and went around destroying entire nightclubs full of the undead, and went “yes, let’s spend money on this? And then Wesley Snipes showed up and was SO committed to the role that the resulting film essentially saved Marvel’s entire cinematic ambitions for the next two decades?
Blade follows Eric Brooks, born when a vampire bit his pregnant mother — which means he inherited all the strengths of vampires (superhuman speed, strength, near-immortality) and none of their weaknesses. Well, one: the thirst for blood, which he manages with a serum. His life’s work is hunting down the vampire nation that killed his mother before he was born, with the help of his aging mentor Whistler (Kristofferson, wonderful). The villain Deacon Frost wants to summon the Blood God, which would be bad. Blade disagrees.
The action sequences are extraordinary for 1998 and still hold up. The opening nightclub massacre is a genuine all-timer — strobing red lights, bodies, carnage, and Snipes in absolute command of every frame he’s in. And yes, a half-vampire hunting other vampires is technically an assassin, so it counts. Don’t @ me.
2. Hitman (2007)
Director: Xavier Gens | Cast: Timothy Olyphant, Dougray Scott, Olga Kurylenko, Robert Knepper, Ulrich Thomsen
A Bald Man With A Barcode Does Crimes in Eastern Europe
Agent 47 is one of gaming’s most iconic characters — a genetically engineered, emotionally blank, razor-precise killer raised from childhood by a shadowy organisation called The Agency, whose only identity is a barcode tattooed on the back of his skull. Timothy Olyphant, bless him, is possibly not the first actor you’d picture in the role, but he shaved his head, put on the iconic red tie, and did his absolute best, and honestly? It’s more fun than it has any right to be.
The plot: 47 is hired to publicly assassinate the Russian President but quickly realises the hit was designed to get him killed and used as a patsy. Now he’s being chased across Russia and Eastern Europe by both Interpol (Dougray Scott) and the FSB, while also grudgingly protecting a woman named Nika who’s been swept up in the conspiracy. What follows is a globe-trotting mess of double-crosses, gunfights, and a man who is constitutionally incapable of small talk trying to navigate human interaction.
It’s not a great film. But it’s a great film to watch at 10pm with a beer, and sometimes that’s exactly the same thing.
3. John Wick (2014)
Director: Chad Stahelski | Cast: Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Adrianne Palicki, Bridget Moynahan, Dean Winters, Ian McShane, John Leguizamo, Willem Dafoe
The Most Important Action Film of the Last Twenty Years
Yes I said it. John Wick is the most important action film of the 21st century. Fight me (please don’t, you’ll lose).
Here is the setup: legendary retired assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) has lost his wife to illness. Her final gift to him is a beagle puppy so he has something to channel his grief into. The son of a Russian mob boss then breaks into his house, beats him unconscious, steals his car, and kills the dog. This, it turns out, was a catastrophic miscalculation.
What Chad Stahelski — a former stuntman and Reeves’ personal stunt double — understood that most action directors don’t is that choreography is language. Every fight in John Wick says something about the character, the space, the stakes. The gun-fu that Reeves executes (after months of training) is fluid and geometrically precise in a way that feels genuinely new, and the unbroken long takes that capture it make you fully believe every single movement. No shaky cam. No editing to hide the work. Just astonishing filmmaking.
The world-building is also quietly extraordinary. The Continental Hotel. The gold coin economy. The Adjudicator. The High Table. All of it unfolds naturally, without clunky exposition. John Wick didn’t just make a great film — it created a whole mythology, and every assassin movie made since has been compared to it.
RELATED: 28 Movies like American Assassin to Get in Your Cross Hairs
4. Collateral (2004)
Director: Michael Mann | Cast: Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Peter Berg, Bruce McGill
Tom Cruise is Silver-Haired and Terrifying and I Love It
Michael Mann shot most of this film on digital video, giving the Los Angeles nightscape a grainy, hypnotic quality — like someone is watching the city through a surveillance feed at 3am. And that aesthetic choice is the first clue that Collateral is doing something genuinely interesting.
Max (Jamie Foxx) is a cab driver. He picks up Vincent (Tom Cruise), a well-dressed, silver-haired man who is immediately, unsettlingly charming. Vincent has a list of five people he needs to visit tonight. They are all targets. Max is going to drive him between each hit whether he likes it or not.
What makes Collateral extraordinary is the dynamic between these two men. Vincent is a nihilist philosopher who has constructed an entire worldview around detachment and efficiency. Max is a dreamer who has been stalling on his ambitions for years. The kills Vincent commits are almost incidental to the film — what Mann is actually interested in is the way these two men talk and argue and push against each other across a long, hot Los Angeles night, getting closer and closer to a confrontation that only one of them can walk away from.
Foxx is incredible. Cruise is terrifying. The film is a masterpiece. Seek it out immediately if you haven’t yet seen it.
5. The Transporter (2002)
Director: Corey Yuen | Cast: Jason Statham, Shu Qi, François Berléand, Matt Schulze, Ric Young
Never Open the Package. He Opened the Package.
Jason Statham was in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000) before this, but The Transporter is where he became Jason Statham in the full archetypal sense. The shaved head, the physicality, the moral code, the absolute refusal to let a fight scene be boring — all of it crystallised here.
Frank Martin is a former Special Forces soldier who now runs a private transportation business out of the south of France. Three rules: never change the deal, no names, never open the package. The package turns out to be a woman named Lai (Shu Qi), which complicates things enormously. Then someone tries to kill him with a suitcase bomb, which complicates things further.
What makes The Transporter sing is the action choreography — director Corey Yuen brings a distinctly Hong Kong cinema sensibility to the fight sequences, and Statham is, frankly, exceptional at executing it. The oil drum fight sequence midway through the film is one of the most inventively staged action scenes of the 2000s and had Statham doing things with his body in a patch of motor oil that should not be physically possible. Brilliant, dumb, immensely satisfying.
6. Wanted (2008)
Director: Timur Bekmambetov | Cast: James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie, Terence Stamp, Thomas Kretschmann, Common, Chris Pratt
Curving Bullets and Absolutely No Chill
Before he was Professor X or the lead in every awards-season film, James McAvoy played Wesley Gibson — a put-upon office drone with crippling anxiety, a boss he hates, and a best friend secretly sleeping with his girlfriend. Wesley is nobody. And then a woman called Fox (Angelina Jolie, operating at maximum Angelina Jolie) appears in his life and tells him his father was one of the most elite assassins in the world, and he’s just been murdered, and the secret society of assassins called The Fraternity wants to recruit Wesley to finish the job.
Timur Bekmambetov is a Russian filmmaker with an absolute disregard for the laws of physics, and he brings that energy wholesale to Wanted. Bullets curve. Cars launch off highway ramps into the windows of other cars. A man’s face is punched so hard by a keyboard that the individual keys spell out a profane message in his skin. The film is unhinged in the absolute best way. Morgan Freeman drops an F-bomb in the third act and it remains one of the most genuinely shocking moments in blockbuster cinema. There’s a twist in the final act that completely recontextualises the story and earns it. Completely underrated.
7. The Equalizer (2014)
Director: Antoine Fuqua | Cast: Denzel Washington, Marton Csokas, Chloë Grace Moretz, David Harbour, Bill Pullman, Melissa Leo
Denzel Washington Will Time Your Death
Robert McCall lives a quiet, ordered life in Boston. He works at a hardware store. He reads. He times himself. He has a habit of counting things, of timing things, of arranging things. When you understand what Robert McCall used to be, you understand that all of this precision is a man working very hard to keep a lid on something.
Based on the 1980s TV series, The Equalizer takes the fundamental premise — former operative with a very particular set of skills helps people who have no one else — and builds it into something genuinely tense and surprising. Denzel Washington doesn’t play Robert McCall as an action hero. He plays him as a man who is deeply, genuinely peaceful, who would prefer to solve every problem with conversation, who is nonetheless terrifying when circumstances require it. The film’s most memorable sequences are the ones where we watch McCall walk into a room full of armed, violent men and quietly assess his options while the audience slowly realises what’s about to happen and the men haven’t yet.
The Russian mob antagonists are credibly menacing. David Harbour (pre-Stranger Things, pre-everything) turns up as a corrupt detective. And Fuqua directs with the measured cool of someone who knows exactly when to detonate something. An absolute gem.
8. The Bourne Identity (2002)
Director: Doug Liman | Cast: Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Chris Cooper, Clive Owen, Brian Cox, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
The Film That Changed Everything
Not exaggerating here. The Bourne Identity changed action cinema. Before Bourne, spy films were glamorous and witty and cool. After Bourne, the conversation became: how do you make it feel real?
The film opens with a man being fished out of the Mediterranean Sea with multiple bullet wounds and no memory of who he is. The Swiss bank account number embedded in his hip leads him to a safety deposit box full of passports, cash in multiple currencies, and a gun. His name, he’ll discover, is Jason Bourne. He is — or was — a CIA assassin, the product of a black-budget programme called Treadstone. And someone very much wants him dead.
Doug Liman shoots all of it with a handheld, restless energy that was genuinely new in 2002. The Paris car chase in the Mini Cooper remains a masterclass. The fight choreography was designed around the real-world combat system Krav Maga, and when Bourne fights — especially the early kitchen fight with a CIA operative — it looks unlike anything that had come before. Desperate, resourceful, improvised. Matt Damon stripped away any movie-star vanity and simply became the best version of this character that could exist. This is basically Matt Damon at his very best.
9. Taken (2008)
Director: Pierre Morel | Cast: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Katie Cassidy, Leland Orser, Holly Valance
96 Hours. That’s It. That’s the Movie.
There is a speech in Taken. You know the speech. Everyone knows the speech. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want.” Pierre Morel lets the camera slowly push in on Liam Neeson’s face as Bryan Mills delivers this monologue down the phone to the man who has just kidnapped his daughter, and by the end of it the entire cinema is holding their breath because oh my god he is coming for you.
The premise is stripped to the bone: Bryan Mills, ex-CIA, estranged father, reluctant to let his teenage daughter travel to Paris for the summer, has his worst fears realised when she and her friend are kidnapped by Albanian traffickers within 24 hours of arriving. He has 96 hours to find her. He goes to Paris. He kicks every man in Paris until he finds her.
Liam Neeson being an action star wasn’t a thing before this film. It is now, and this is why. There’s something about his size and his gravitas and the quiet, controlled menace he brings to the role that makes it work in a way that feels different from any other “reluctant warrior” movie. The action is lean and functional and efficient, much like the man himself. There is not a single wasted frame in Taken.
10. Crank (2006)
Directors: Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor | Cast: Jason Statham, Amy Smart, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Efren Ramirez, Dwight Yoakam
Cinema’s Most Unhinged 96 Minutes
The premise of Crank is: a hitman named Chev Chelios has been injected with a poison that will kill him if his heart rate drops too low. He has one day to find the man responsible and exact revenge, during which time he must do increasingly extreme things to keep his adrenaline up. That’s it. That’s the whole movie.
Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor direct like two men who have never heard the word “subtlety” and are deeply suspicious of people who have. Crank is shot with handheld cameras and drones and unconventional angles and edits so fast they’re basically subliminal. It has the aesthetic of a first-person shooter game played by someone mainlining energy drinks. And Jason Statham — god bless him — plays the whole thing completely, unironically straight, which somehow makes it funnier and more entertaining than any amount of self-aware winking would.
It is absolutely not a film for everyone. But if you have ever watched an action movie and thought “this is not quite insane enough,” Crank is specifically the film that exists to fix that problem.
11. Tenet (2020)
Director: Christopher Nolan | Cast: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine, Kenneth Branagh
Christopher Nolan Invents a New Way to Confuse You
Tenet is the film Christopher Nolan made when someone dared him to make the most conceptually ambitious action movie in history and he took it as a challenge rather than an insult. The result is a film where objects and people can move backwards through time (called “inversion”), and a CIA operative known only as The Protagonist must use this technology to prevent a future civilisation from destroying the past in an act of omnicidal revenge.
John David Washington is extraordinary as the Protagonist — physically commanding, charismatic, and doing a lot of heavy lifting in scenes where the exposition requires him to explain things that Christopher Nolan barely understands how to explain. Robert Pattinson is quietly the best thing in the film as his mysterious associate Neil, full of a gentle warmth that provides the film’s emotional core. Elizabeth Debicki towers over every scene she’s in, in every sense.
Is Tenet difficult? Yes. Are there scenes where you genuinely cannot parse what is happening on a logistical level? Also yes. Does it still somehow work as a breathless experience of pure cinematic ambition? Absolutely yes. The Tallinn highway sequence runs forwards and backwards simultaneously and is one of the greatest action set pieces ever filmed. Watch it twice. You’ll understand more the second time. Probably.
12. The One (2001)
Director: James Wong | Cast: Jet Li, Delroy Lindo, Carla Gugino, Jason Statham
Jet Li Fights Jet Li and It Is Exactly As Good As That Sounds
The One is a film with one of the most purely enjoyable premises in the genre: what if a man discovered that the multiverse existed, and also that if you killed alternate versions of yourself, you absorbed their life force and became stronger? And what if that man was Jet Li, and he had already killed 123 of his 124 alternate selves?
Gabriel Yulaw is the villain — rogue, power-mad, nearly unstoppable by the time we meet him. Gabe Law is his last surviving counterpart, an LASD deputy sheriff who has started developing strange accelerating abilities he can’t explain. The two are destined for a collision that only one of them survives. The film wisely gives Jet Li completely different fighting styles for each character — Yulaw moves in slow, powerful Xingyi-influenced strikes; Gabe fights in fluid, fast Bagua-inspired circles — so you can always tell them apart during the extraordinary final confrontation.
Jason Statham is here as an interdimensional agent. It was 2001 and he was everywhere. Delroy Lindo brings more gravitas than this movie technically deserves. And James Wong directs with enormous good-natured energy, embracing the silliness completely. The One is not a film trying to be Citizen Kane. It’s a film trying to make you go “oh sick” at a fight scene, and on that metric it succeeds profoundly.
13. Rogue Hostage (2021)
Director: Jon Keeyes | Cast: Tyrese Gibson, John Malkovich, Michael Jai White, Christopher Backus
PTSD, A Hostage Crisis, and John Malkovich Being John Malkovich
Rogue Hostage operates on two parallel tracks. The first is Kyle Snowden (Tyrese Gibson), a former Marine carrying a serious and debilitating form of PTSD from his time in combat — the kind that doesn’t stay in the past but bleeds into every interaction and decision in the present. The second is Congressman Sam Nelson (John Malkovich), a political figure with his own set of complications, who represents the civilian world that guys like Kyle came back to and found confusing and indifferent.
When an extremist group seizes a retail store in a hostage situation, these two men’s worlds collide violently. Both are forced to confront each other and, in Kyle’s case, confront himself — the skills his service gave him, the damage it also caused, and what he’s actually willing to do when pushed.
It’s a lean film that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Michael Jai White is reliably compelling. Malkovich is Malkovich, which is to say he is better than the material requires and somehow elevates it. And Gibson demonstrates a vulnerability in the performance that the genre doesn’t always make space for. Worth your Friday night.
14. Renegades (2017)
Director: Steven Quale | Cast: Sullivan Stapleton, J.K. Simmons, Charlie Bewley, Alain Blažević, Sylvia Hoeks, Ewen Bremner, Clemens Schick
Navy SEALs, A Bosnian Lake, and Nazi Gold. What More Do You Want?
Renegades asks a question with tremendous audacity: what if a team of bored NATO special forces discovered that a bank vault full of Nazi gold was submerged in a Bosnian lake, and then just went and got it?
That’s the premise. Sullivan Stapleton leads the SEAL team who can’t officially be authorised to run a freelance treasure recovery operation in a postwar Balkan country but are absolutely going to do it anyway while their commanding officer (J.K. Simmons, radiating the specific exhaustion of a man who expected better from his people) pretends not to know what they’re doing. The underwater sequences are actually impressive — the submerged Bosnian village they’re diving through has a genuinely eerie, melancholy quality — and the antagonists pursuing them have strong motivations rooted in wartime history.
Is it a prestige film? Obviously not. Is it a thoroughly entertaining action thriller with a premise original enough to set it apart from the standard genre fare? Absolutely yes. The kind of film you stumble across on a streaming platform at 11pm and end up watching all the way through.
15. Beirut (2018)
Director: Brad Anderson | Cast: Jon Hamm, Rosamund Pike, Dean Norris, Shea Whigham, Larry Pine
Jon Hamm, Beirut, and the Weight of What We Break
Tony Gilroy — who wrote the Bourne films — wrote Beirut, and that pedigree shows in every scene. This is a smart, morally literate political thriller that earns every one of its tension beats.
Mason Skiles (Jon Hamm) is a US diplomat in 1970s Beirut, living there with his wife and having built a genuine life in a city he loves, when a dinner party ends in tragedy. A Palestinian teenager he’d been informally fostering turns out to have a terrorist for a brother, and the night ends with multiple deaths and Mason’s world collapsing. Flash forward ten years: Mason is a broken, alcoholic negotiator back in the US. He’s dragged back to a war-ravaged Beirut by the CIA (in the form of Rosamund Pike, excellent) who need his unique knowledge of the city and its players to navigate a hostage crisis involving someone he knows.
Hamm uses every bit of his considerable screen presence here — Mason is charming and damaged and unreliable and ultimately decent, a complicated man trying to do a clean thing in a dirty situation. The film doesn’t pretend there are heroes, and it doesn’t pretend the Middle East is simple. It is, in the best possible way, a grown-up thriller.
16. Bullet Train (2022)
Director: David Leitch | Cast: Brad Pitt, Joey King, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry, Andrew Koji, Hiroyuki Sanada, Michael Shannon, Bad Bunny, Sandra Bullock
Brad Pitt is an Unlucky Assassin on a Very Fast Train and It’s Brilliant
From the director of Deadpool 2 and John Wick comes the movie that asks: what if you put about nine professional killers on a Japanese bullet train, gave them all connected and completely incompatible objectives, and then just let Brad Pitt wander between them with very bad luck and a lot of therapy language?
Brad Pitt plays Ladybug, an assassin who has been going to therapy and is trying to approach his work with more mindfulness and less violence. He is sent to retrieve a briefcase from a train. He is surrounded by people who all want to kill him for separate reasons, most of whom also want to kill each other. Fate, the film suggests repeatedly, is a bastard.
Based on the Japanese novel by Kōtarō Isaka, Bullet Train is a Guy Ritchie-esque ensemble comedy-action that keeps pulling the rug out with new revelations about how all these seemingly separate storylines connect. The real MVPs are Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry as Tangerine and Lemon — bickering British assassins with a fixation on Thomas the Tank Engine that will either make you lose your mind or love the film even more. David Leitch stages the action with his trademark clarity and choreographic brilliance. It grossed $239 million worldwide. The ending involves a truck, a mountain town, and an amount of carnage that needs to be seen to be believed.
17. The Gray Man (2022)
Director: Anthony & Joe Russo | Cast: Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Regé-Jean Page, Jessica Henwick, Wagner Moura, Dhanush, Alfre Woodard, Billy Bob Thornton
Netflix Spent $200 Million and Got a Very Good Time
So the Russo brothers — fresh off Avengers: Endgame, the highest-grossing film in history — sat down and went “what if we made a Jason Bourne movie but gave it a budget the size of a small country’s GDP?” Netflix agreed enthusiastically. The result is The Gray Man.
Ryan Gosling plays Sierra Six, a CIA black-ops asset whose entire identity is a number, extracted from prison years earlier by handler Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) for the specific purpose of being off the books and fully deniable. When Six stumbles across evidence of corruption at the top of the CIA, the agency’s new sociopathic fixer Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans, who is clearly having the time of his life playing a villain in polo shirts) puts a global bounty on his head.
Is the script a bit thin? Yes. Does it matter when Gosling and Evans are this watchable opposite each other? Absolutely not. The Prague tram sequence is legitimately spectacular, Ana de Armas is doing more with her role than the script deserves, and the film moves with the breathless efficiency of a Marvel blockbuster crossed with a Bourne film. A genuinely great popcorn movie.
18. Heart of Stone (2023)
Director: Tom Harper | Cast: Gal Gadot, Jamie Dornan, Alia Bhatt, Sophie Okonedo, Matthias Schweighöfer
Netflix’s Attempted Female James Bond (With Bonus AI MacGuffin)
Heart of Stone is a film that critics mostly disliked, audiences watched in their millions, and which represents Netflix’s ongoing attempt to figure out if Gal Gadot can carry a franchise in the way that Tom Cruise carries Mission: Impossible. The jury is still out. The film is quite fun anyway.
Gadot plays Rachel Stone, a CIA technician who is secretly also an operative for Charter — a covert non-governmental peacekeeping organisation of former intelligence professionals who answer to no government. The plot involves a quantum computer called “The Heart” that can hack anything, anywhere, in real time, and predict future outcomes with extraordinary accuracy. A gifted young Indian hacker named Keya (Alia Bhatt, in her Hollywood debut and extremely watchable) wants it. Stone needs to stop her. Then it gets more complicated.
The action sequences are slick and well-staged, the globe-trotting locations look gorgeous, and the film moves fast enough that you rarely notice the plot holes long enough to be bothered by them. It’s not reinventing the wheel. It is spinning the wheel very competently and very stylishly, and sometimes that’s enough. Netflix’s second most-watched film of 2023 with nearly 110 million views — the people have spoken.
19. Mile 22 (2018)
Director: Peter Berg | Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Iko Uwais, John Malkovich, Lauren Cohan, Ronda Rousey
22 Miles of Pure, Relentless Chaos
Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg’s fourth collaboration together (following Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon, and Patriots Day) is, by some distance, their most purely deranged. Previous Berg/Wahlberg collaborations were grounded in real events. Mile 22 is entirely fictional, and that freedom appears to have encouraged both men to turn the dial to about eleven and leave it there.
Mark Wahlberg plays James Silva, an operative of the CIA’s Ground Branch — a real-world paramilitary unit within the Special Activities Division — who leads a small team called Overwatch. Silva is a man who communicates almost entirely in barely contained aggression and has a rubber band on his wrist for when his temper threatens to cause an international incident. He wears it a lot.
The mission: escort Indonesian police officer Li Noor (Iko Uwais, of The Raid films, and essentially worth the price of admission by himself) from the US Embassy to an extraction point 22 miles away. Li Noor claims to know the location of hidden radioactive caesium that could be weaponised. Every gang, police unit, and intelligence service in the city wants to stop them. What follows is 95 minutes of escalating, unrelenting combat through anonymous Southeast Asian streets — and then a third-act twist that recontextualises the entire preceding film in the best possible way. The Iko Uwais fight sequences are extraordinary; the editing occasionally rivals the chaos it’s depicting. Fun as hell.
20. Interceptor (2022)
Director: Matthew Reilly | Cast: Elsa Pataky, Luke Bracey, Aaron Glenane, Mayen Mehta, Zoe Carides
One Woman. One Base. Sixteen Nuclear Missiles.
Here’s the thing about Interceptor: critics hated it and it hit number one on Netflix with 50 million viewing hours in its opening weeks, which tells you everything you need to know about the gap between what critics want from action films and what audiences actually want.
Elsa Pataky plays Captain JJ Collins, a decorated Army officer who has been wrongfully reassigned to a remote Pacific Ocean interceptor base after she reported sexual misconduct by a superior officer. The base exists to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles. It is about to become very important. Ex-military intelligence operative Alexander Kessel (Luke Bracey, doing villain very well) has simultaneously seized the other American interceptor base in Alaska and is planning to launch 16 stolen Russian warheads at American cities. The only thing standing between him and success is JJ Collins, alone on a floating platform in the Pacific, with limited resources and a lot of stubbornness.
It’s a Die Hard premise — one person, one location, impossible odds — executed with genuine commitment. Pataky trained for months for the role and it shows. Chris Hemsworth (her actual husband, also the producer) has an uncredited cameo that is the single funniest thing in the film. Unpretentious, high-octane, enormously watchable.
21. One Shot (2021)
Director: James Nunn | Cast: Scott Adkins, Ashley Greene Khoury, Ryan Phillippe, Waleed Elgadi, Terence Maynard
The Whole Film Is One Take (Sort Of)
One Shot is a technical achievement that is also just a great action film, and combining those two things is harder than it sounds.
Scott Adkins plays Lieutenant Jake Harris, a Navy SEAL leading a small team to a remote CIA black site island prison. The mission: extract suspected terrorist Amin Mansour before his intelligence goes cold. Junior CIA analyst Zoe Anderson (Ashley Greene Khoury) is along for her first field assignment and is already discovering that field assignments are considerably more stressful than her training suggested. The site’s arrogant chief (Ryan Phillippe) doesn’t want to release the prisoner. And then a coordinated attack by insurgents hits the facility simultaneously, turning the extraction mission into a running, real-time battle for survival.
The film has been edited to appear as though shot in a single, continuous take — in the tradition of Birdman and 1917. It was actually shot in 20 days using long takes digitally stitched together, and the technical accomplishment of making it work over an entire feature is remarkable. More importantly, the sustained real-time urgency it creates means you never get to breathe. The camera is always there, right in the middle of everything, stumbling and panning and catching moments of chaos. Adkins is exceptional, and the ending hits with genuine force.
22. 24 Hours to Live (2017)
Director: Brian Smrz | Cast: Ethan Hawke, Xu Qing, Liam Cunningham, Rutger Hauer, Paul Anderson
Ethan Hawke Has a Countdown Timer in His Wrist and Is Not Happy About It
The Crank comparison is inevitable and not entirely unfair, but 24 Hours to Live has something Crank doesn’t: Ethan Hawke. And Ethan Hawke brings a weariness and genuine emotional weight to this premise that elevates it above the genre’s average ceiling.
Travis Conrad (Hawke) is a burned-out assassin for a private security firm called Red Mountain, grieving the deaths of his wife and son, drinking himself into the Florida sunset with his father-in-law (Rutger Hauer, in one of his final roles). When former Army buddy Jim (Paul Anderson) offers him $1 million a day to come back for one job — kill a whistleblower before he can testify at the UN — Travis takes it, partly for the money and partly because he doesn’t have much reason to say no to anything.
The job goes wrong. Travis gets shot dead. Red Mountain, wanting to know what the whistleblower told him before he died, uses an experimental technology called the Lazarus Unit to resurrect him — but only for 24 hours, measured by a digital countdown implanted in his wrist. Travis, now with a ticking clock and nothing to lose, decides to burn Red Mountain to the ground.
Director Brian Smrz is a veteran Hollywood stunt coordinator and the action sequences reflect that background in every frame. The car chases, the fight choreography, the shootouts — all of it has a precision and clarity that you don’t always find at this budget level. Fun, surprising, and Ethan Hawke being great in a genre you wouldn’t have predicted he’d be great in.
23. Kandahar (2023)
Director: Ric Roman Waugh | Cast: Gerard Butler, Navid Negahban, Travis Fimmel, Ali Fazal, Nina Toussaint-White
Gerard Butler Does Serious, and It Actually Works
Kandahar is the third collaboration between Gerard Butler and director Ric Roman Waugh, following Angel Has Fallen and Greenland, and it’s their most ambitious and arguably their best. This is a Gerard Butler movie that is genuinely trying to be something — that has things it wants to say about Afghanistan, about the cost of covert operations, about the people left behind when Western forces withdraw — and that ambition is admirable even when the film occasionally stumbles under the weight of it.
Loosely based on the actual experiences of screenwriter Mitchell LaFortune, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer deployed during the Snowden leaks, the film follows Tom Harris, a freelance CIA operative who has just successfully sabotaged an Iranian nuclear facility. When a captured journalist’s testimony blows his cover and his name is leaked to the international press, Tom and his Afghan-American translator Mohammad “Mo” Doud (Navid Negahban, remarkable) have 30 hours to travel 400 miles through hostile territory to an extraction point in Kandahar, pursued simultaneously by Pakistani intelligence, Iranian military, and Taliban warlords.
The chemistry between Butler and Negahban is the film’s greatest asset, and Mo — a man with his own complicated history with the region — is a far more interesting character than the usual “helpful local” trope. The action is excellent. The ending is genuinely moving. One of the better surprise entries in the genre in recent years.
24. Unthinkable (2010)
Director: Gregor Jordan | Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Sheen, Carrie-Anne Moss
The Most Uncomfortable Film On This List, Also One of the Best
Let’s be clear upfront: Unthinkable is not a fun watch. It is a film that will make you deeply, genuinely uncomfortable, force you to confront your own ethics, and then refuse to let you off the hook with a tidy conclusion. It went straight to DVD/VOD because no distributor could stomach releasing it theatrically. It deserves a much wider audience than it has.
Steven Younger (Michael Sheen, extraordinary) is a former US Delta Force operator who has converted to Islam, married, had children, and then planted three nuclear devices in three American cities. He wants US military withdrawal from Islamic nations. The government has him in a converted high school, and they’ve brought in a man known only as H (Samuel L. Jackson) to extract the locations.
H will do anything. The film does not blink.
Jackson gives one of the best performances of his career, playing a man who has constructed an entirely coherent moral framework around his willingness to commit acts of torture — not a sadist, but a pragmatist, which is somehow worse. Carrie-Anne Moss plays the FBI agent whose horror at H’s methods represents the audience’s position. Sheen plays Younger as a man who anticipated all of this and has planned several steps ahead. The film’s climax involves a choice so morally catastrophic that audiences at screenings reportedly yelled at the screen.
Fourteen years after its release, it entered Netflix’s US Top 10 in 2024. Word of mouth doesn’t lie.
25. Legacy of Lies (2020)
Director: Adrian Bol | Cast: Scott Adkins, Honor Kneafsey, Yuliia Sobol, Martin McDougall
Scott Adkins Goes Spy Thriller with a Side of Father-Daughter Feels
Scott Adkins is one of those actors who has been criminally underused by mainstream cinema while absolutely dominating the direct-to-streaming action space. He’s a legitimate martial artist, a skilled actor, and a man who clearly cares deeply about the quality of the work even when the budget is modest. Legacy of Lies is one of his best.
Martin Baxter was an MI6 operative until a mission in Kyiv went catastrophically wrong and cost him his wife. That was ten years ago. Now he’s a cage fighter and nightclub bouncer in London, raising his bright, inquisitive twelve-year-old daughter Lisa (Honor Kneafsey, genuinely great), keeping his head down and his past in the past. A Ukrainian journalist named Sasha approaches him for help uncovering evidence of Russian covert operations — evidence connected to the files Martin’s wife died trying to retrieve. Within hours, Russian and British intelligence are both in play, and Lisa has been taken to ensure Martin’s cooperation.
Shot on location in London and Kyiv, the film has a political undercurrent — a very clear pro-Ukrainian, anti-Putin stance — that gives it more weight than the genre usually carries. The father-daughter relationship is rendered with genuine warmth. And the action sequences, featuring Adkins doing what Adkins does best, are superb. A proper good film that got almost no attention on release. Fix that.
26. Ava (2020)
Director: Tate Taylor | Cast: Jessica Chastain, John Malkovich, Colin Farrell, Common, Geena Davis, Joan Chen
Jessica Chastain Has A Whole Lot of Baggage, Also Guns
Here is the pitch: Jessica Chastain as a globe-trotting assassin with a black ops past, a troubled family, a history of addiction, and an increasingly inconvenient habit of asking her targets why someone wants them dead before she kills them. John Malkovich as her handler. Colin Farrell as the organisation’s internal fixer who views her as a liability. Geena Davis as her estranged mother. Common as her sister’s boyfriend and her own ex-fiancé. It’s a lot going on.
Ava (Chastain) works for a shadowy organisation that takes contracts that governments can’t officially run. When a job in Saudi Arabia goes wrong and her handler Duke (Malkovich) runs out of ways to cover for her, the organisation’s management — in the form of a perversely mustachioed Colin Farrell — decides she needs to be eliminated. Then she comes home to Boston for the first time in eight years and finds every interpersonal relationship she walked away from ready and waiting to be a problem.
Critics were unmerciful to this film, and it has real flaws — the script never quite unifies its two modes (family drama and action thriller), and some of the Boston sequences drag. But Chastain is magnetic, Malkovich and Farrell appear to be having the time of their respective lives, and a late-film mano-a-mano between those two is worth the price of admission alone. Flawed but worth your time.
27. Anna (2019)
Director: Luc Besson | Cast: Sasha Luss, Helen Mirren, Luke Evans, Cillian Murphy, Alexander Petrov
Luc Besson Makes La Femme Nikita Again (It’s Still Good)
We should probably acknowledge that Anna is, essentially, Luc Besson making La Femme Nikita for the fourth time (following the original, the Hollywood remake Point of No Return, and parts of Lucy), and that Besson is quite good at making La Femme Nikita, so this is not as damning a criticism as it sounds.
Anna Poliatova (Sasha Luss, a model-turned-actress who handles the physical demands brilliantly) is a young Russian woman in a desperate situation in 1990 Moscow when KGB officer Alex (Luke Evans) spots her natural gifts and recruits her. The deal: five years as a KGB assassin, then complete freedom. The KGB does not honour deals. Both the CIA (in the form of Cillian Murphy, doing excellent work as a conflicted handler who develops feelings) and the KGB want to use her, neither intends to let her go, and Anna — who is considerably smarter than anyone around her is giving her credit for — is playing both sides simultaneously against a middle that benefits only her.
The trick Besson pulls is structural: the film constantly jumps back in time to reveal that scenes we thought we understood were actually operating on multiple levels. It keeps the audience perpetually off-balance. Helen Mirren as the icy KGB chief Olga is an absolute force of nature. The restaurant massacre sequence is one of the genre’s best action set pieces in the past decade. Come for the gunfights, stay for Helen Mirren.
28. The Contractor (2022)
Director: Tarik Saleh | Cast: Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Kiefer Sutherland, Gillian Jacobs, Eddie Marsan, Florian Munteanu
Chris Pine is a Veteran, The System Failed Him, He’s In Germany Now
The Contractor arrived without fanfare, grossed almost nothing theatrically, and is — genuinely — a solid, thoughtful action thriller that deserved a better fate.
Chris Pine plays James Harper, a decorated Green Beret who is involuntarily discharged from the Army after a drug test reveals he’s been taking steroids to manage a debilitating knee injury. He loses his pension, his benefits, his healthcare — everything. With a family to support and creditors closing in, he takes the only option available: a private contracting gig through his best friend Mike (Ben Foster) under the command of former veteran Rusty Jennings (Kiefer Sutherland, doing menacing mentor very well).
The first mission sends them to Berlin. It goes wrong in ways that reveal Jennings’ operation is considerably less legitimate than advertised. Harper finds himself alone in a foreign country, hunted by both European security forces and the people who hired him, trying to understand the conspiracy he’s been dropped into.
Tarik Saleh directs with the lean efficiency of the best Bourne sequels — this is emphatically a post-Bourne film in all the right ways — and Pine brings genuine vulnerability to a role that could easily have been generic. The film is interested in what the private military industry actually does to the people who pass through it, and that seriousness of purpose elevates it. A neo-Bourne thriller with a conscience.
Did Any Of These Scratch The American Assassin Itch?
Drop a comment below and tell us which one destroyed you the most! Or if we missed a certified banger that should be on this list, let us know that too — we will defend our choices with the energy of a man who just re-watched John Wick for the sixth time.
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